typewriting

in response to the recent discussion of church and state in america, joi ito wrote As we Shintos like to say, you can put your god over there next to our other gods. this has inspired a good deal of discussion of japan as an alternative to american fundamentalist religious views. but i don't think "tolerant" is an accurate description of japanese religion. japanese have killed people in religiously-motivated wars not altogether different from the christian-motivated wars and the "tolerance" of modern japanese religious beliefs is rooted in secular, not religious, beliefs.

my senior thesis (PDF link) topic began as a vague "homosexuality in japan". before narrowing it down significantly to lesbian suicide between the world wars, i gathered a general overview of homosexuality in japanese history. there are only a dozen or so books dealing with this topic, and too little of the known history has made its way online. one of the few online summaries is the poorly named "Japanese History For Gay Men", which briefly discusses the early accounts of homosexuality in japan, first among buddhists (a popular myth even suggests homosexuality was "imported" into japan from china by a single buddhist monk), and then samurai:

Since the samurai was seriously influenced of Buddhism or they served for the aristocrats, they inherited priests' custom as it was, and spread the custom further.

after the presumption that homosexuality is a "custom" that can be "spread", the most surprising aspect of this history is that buddhism seriously influenced samurai, as buddhists are most widely known as pacifists, and samurai as warriors. of course these are terribly oversimplified representations of these two groups. samurai culture involved much more than war, and buddhists have at many times and places been directly involved in wars. japanese buddhists have been no exception.

as japan's indigenous religion, shinto provided a natural tool for promoting nationalism in japan. in "RELIGIOUS FREEDOM PROBLEMS IN JAPAN", tokihisa sumimoto writes:

Japan embarked on a war of aggression against Asian countries in 1937 and against the United States and their allies 1941. The wartime regime was built upon the foundation of pure religious statism. This was made possible by elevating State Shinto to the position of the "only religion" which provided a spiritual basis for Japanese ultranationalism. The emperor was vested with both sovereignty and divinity, and the entire country was forcibly converted. All other religions were either persecuted or subordinated to the cult of emperor worship.

but buddhists also contributed to the militarist fervor. the book zen at war (which i haven't read) provides a detailed account of how zen buddism in particular helped fuel japan's advance toward world war two. because of all of this, i was surprised to read jonathon delacour's recent suggestion that Whatever the faults of the Japanese...religious bigotry isn't high on the list.

while the history of japanese religion contained such religious intolerance, modern japanese religion contains secular tolerance. an often repeated description of modern japanese religion goes something like this: "everyone in japan is born shinto, marries christian, and dies buddhist". you would never see a survey of japanese asking them to pick their "religion" because nearly everyone has "religions". but this isn't really religious tolerance in the sense that japanese buddhists don't tolerate japanese shintos. japanese buddhists are japanese shintos. the japanese can't really be suggested as an ideal of religious tolerance without also suggesting polytheism as an ideal of religious belief. jonathon writes of his friend natsuko: She wasn't actually saying that the Japanese don't have strongly held beliefs since that clearly isn't true. if he means beliefs in general, he's right; japanese have strongly held beliefs. but i also think it's true that japanese (generally) don't have strongly held religious beliefs to the extent americans do. for example, it's clear that japanese don't have christian weddings so often because they strongly believe in the religious significance of a christian wedding. the reason japanese commonly choose christian weddings is that the ritual of a christian wedding is seen as more "modern". a wedding signifies something new, whereas birth and death naturally emphasize family roots, so are more commonly performed with traditional (shinto and buddhist) rituals. an article on "christian" weddings in japan (notice the quotation marks around christian) quotes a bride on her decision of wedding style:

"If we had thought about our parents, we would have had a Japanese style ceremony but we are young, we wanted a more casual style," said Yuko

i don't mean to suggest the rest of the world doesn't have a lot to learn from japanese religious views. but if we ever hope to solve the problems of religious intolerance, i think it's important to recognize that they aren't unique to america. and for most believers, "switch to shinto" isn't a solution.

jon udell has compiled a list of 60 people, including both the richest man in the world and myself, who remains unemployed. he did this with some interesting use of structured text. but i'd like you to focus on bill gates and me.

i have used camino for too long. so long that i know what to do when it crashes, which is to delete the cache folder - without opening it mind you, as doing so would crash the finder - or else it will never open again. so i'm switching to safari, which i will also unhappily use and have been avoiding, mostly because of the metal theme, which i find ugly. i'm also starting to use ichat, having previously used proteus. proteus allows me to use aol, yahoo, and msn instant messaging simultaneously, so that aol isn't the only means of messaging me (though 90% of my messages come through aol anyway - it's the principle). i started using ichat because proteus doesn't handle group chats correctly (by which i mean at all), but i will continue to use it because the interface is too slick to pass up. but i won't be happy about the lack of support for other IM services, nor the metal theme, though it's not as annoying in ichat because there's less window border.

i really have nothing to complain about. i only notice these unfortunate choices between the lesser of inconveniences because the rest of the software i use generally does everything i want with clean interfaces and no crashing. and these problems i have are with software for which i've paid nothing. these are my worst computer problems. life is good.

i'd like to see an instant messaging client that supports simple editing. the editing would be clearly marked as such, perhaps looking something like net news wire's new HTML differences view (or, optionally, the user could enable unmarked editing). commands matching a defined editing syntax, maybe something simple like 'teh -> the' would cause the previously sent text to be edited accordingly. naturally, edit commands would just show up as text in clients not supporting editing, so the editing syntax would need to be human-readable.

having no previous knowledge of mike lea, i just read on joi ito's weblog that he killed himself on friday, and then followed the link to his homepage, which, in retrospect at least, could hardly be more indicative of his impending suicide. his weblog from two weeks ago, for example:

holes and memories. i have a hole in one of my teeth. when i move my jaw in a certain way, or explore the hole with my tongue, i get shooting pains through my head. i have a hole in my life, sometimes I think my life is nothing but holes. Whenever I think about them, it sends shooting pains through my life, and I want to die. I can go to a dentist and he'll pull the tooth with the hole in it. The holes in my life are what my life is made of, they are my memories, and the only way to excise them is with a bullet. It seems like other people heal with time, forgive with time, change with time, forget with time. I don't. I seem to be stuck here with my holes, memories and holes.

i don't really know what to add to that, except that i have the song, "another man's done gone" running in my head.

RSSlets are single-purpose html-to-RSS page scrapers. if it takes off, it could spread RSS widely, and demand answers to the questions surrounding unauthorized RSS feeds. a huge amount of content on the web exists as lists (whether or not it's marked as such), and RSS clients offer better interfaces for viewing lists than web browsers. work like RSSlets suggests that when simple semantic markups exist, the tools will soon follow to translate non-semantic content into something semantic. if these tools survive the inevitable legal challenges, we'll have a smoother road map to the semantic web than the w3c is currently offering.

in a brilliant move to transform a financial loss into a marketing tool, holiday inn has declared august 28 to be "towel amnesty day". if the RIAA would do something like this, it could be a great opportunity to promote its music. instead, it's suing its customer base.

after the made-for-tv movie series "news", i'm sure you're aware that there's a recall coming up in california. what you may not be aware of is that this recall is part of a vast conspiracy, often blamed on right-wing extremists, but with much more sinister roots.

the progressive majority writes right-wing interest groups are pushing to overturn the results of a free and fair election. moveon.org suggested that the recall is part of a trend undermining our democratic institutions. the nation called the recall tragedy, farce and a lot more. clearly something is going terribly wrong in california.

but what these organizations don't want you to know is that the california recall is only part of a much larger threat to our democracy, and the very organizations criticizing the recall are participating in this insidious practice, known as "voting". the practice of "voting" allows individual citizens to throw politicians out of office simply because they don't like them. this practice is responsible for the recall in california, and it will be part of a much larger scheme planned by extremists on both the right and left as soon as 2004.

i've managed to dig up some quotes hinting at this secret plot. the progressive majority published a document stating If we are serious about getting rid of George W. Bush in 17 months, then we have to make some decisions and some commitments. (emphasis added) they're talking about getting rid of the president, an elected official, using the same means they've criticized in the california recall: "voting".

the nation wrote changing hearts and minds can at times be as important as changing the President (emphasis added) they're not only talking about getting rid of the leader of our country, but also about a related plot to perform forced organ transplants. all of this can be traced back to the practice of "voting".

moveon.org even went so far as to publish a document titled VOTING AND DEMOCRACY: THE CHALLENGES AHEAD clearly this "voting" must be stopped before it "challenges" and destroys democracy. but is there any hope? cnn reports that "voting" has already spread as far away as rwanda.

to stop the plague of "voting", we have to first understand how it began. this is the truly frightening part of my investigation. it seems that way back in 1870, our own government approved and even formalized "voting" in a secret document known only as the "15th Amendment". perhaps we are indeed too late to stop the scourge of "voting". but we must try. the first step is clearly to stop the recall "vote" before any more elected officials are "voted" away. if we don't act now before it's too late, we may soon have no one left to abuse our trust in government.

boing boing has a post about the "save christiania" gathering on august 30. a friend of mine recently visited christiania, and sent me this in an email journal:

chrisitiania was an abandoned army base that was made home by hippies in the 60?s, it has been allowed its own government and has an atmosphere as happy as the smurfs. there are posters and graffiti everywhere that say ?say no to hard drugs?, one such sign was located right behind the gaurd at the gate. you see in denmark it?s legal to smoke pot though looked down on by many, it?s just illegal to sell it, except on pusher street in christiana, however there have been rumours that the police are going to shut it down so there are gaurds at all entrances with radios to warn in case of a police raid. oddly enough, this small sect of the city with its own governemnt has little to no crime even though it has ?soft drugs? legal and runs itself. there?s alot to be said for that. makes one think. we wandered down pusher street and into the surrounding neighborhood, the houses were all painted crazy colours and the grass and gardens were allowed to grow free, i wouldn?t say they were unkempt, just free. some of the houses were beautiful and some seemed architecturally impossible, something like smurf huts. in fact the whole thing had the happy laid back feel of the smurfs, the smell of marijauna floated as freely as the gardens and the wind carried that and a lady singing opera in her house out into the colorful streets. i took few to no pictures because there was a big sign that had the ghostbuster logo up except a camera was in the ghosts place...

you may have noticed that after a flurry of posts related to the job feeds, i stopped updating it. you may have assumed this was merely an extension of my regular pattern of switching projects every three days, but there you'd be wrong. what's really happened is that i've bought a new domain name, disemployed.com, and begun working with two of my friends to improve and expand job search tools. barring unforeseen circumstances, the existing job feeds here on randomchaos.com will remain unchanged, and a better and for-profit version of the same will appear soon at disemployed.com

a few weeks ago a friend of mine told me about synaesthesia, a rare condition in which a stimulus received in one sensory modality gives rise to an experience in another. althought it sounds like LSD or fiction, there seems to be a good deal of evidence suggesting that some people can actually do things such as seeing sound or smelling light.

it was just today that i discovered that i am possibly one of these people. i have a very strong tendancy to sneeze when i'm going from an indoor to an outdoor environment. because i spend a good portion of my day in front of a computer, i've joked that i'm "allergic to outside". but after reading that about 25% of people sneeze when exposed to sunlight, i suspect that sunlight is actually the cause of my own sneezing. this also makes me wonder if there might be a relationship between sun sneezing and anosmia.

neither synaesthesia nor sun sneezing have been researched much at all, unfortunately. this kind of phenomenon is so contradictory to how we normally think of the physical world that i would think it has great potential to drastically improve our understanding of a wide variety of scientific issues.

brent just added gzip compression support to net news wire, and noted that few webloggers are gzipping. i've been gzipping for nine months now, so i'm a qualified expert to offer a short tutorial for weblog authors using php:

to enable gzipping in php, add the following code to the top of each script (or to a single script included at the top of all others):
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

i know it looks complicated, but with a little trial and error, you too can type those twenty five characters and do your part to reduce bandwidth. for advanced coders, there's a special method involving procedures known as "copy" and "paste", but i won't get into that here.

mark pilgrim, should atom use RDF:

What About the Semantic Web?

I don't care about the Semantic Web. Next question?

just think about this: Terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got. no really - think about it.

in the interest of ending the name election of 2003, i spent about thirty minutes looking for a name that the everyone can't help but to agree is clearly the best name for this project. failing that, i came up with "koko".

in japanese, "koko" means "individual", "separate", "one by one", "every house", and "here". most of these meanings, i think, vaguely suggest the functionality of syndication (especially "one by one").

among english speakers "koko" is most commonly associated with a gorilla famous for speaking sign language. i like the association with communication.

on the domain name front, koko.com is a radio station company in england, koko.org is a nonprofit dedicated to the gorilla, and koko.net is available (via resale).

potential trademark issue: koko interactive, who abreviate their own name to "koko", is a company that specializes in technologies that enable you to foster collaboration. the closest match at the uspto is a patent for computerized medical equipment.

i've now spent more time writing a pitch than i did searching for a name, completing my one hour of contribution to this project. hope it helps.

brent simmons writes about why he can't afford to not display broken feeds. this is a chicken and egg problem. feed producers don't have a real incentive to fix broken feeds until feed readers stop reading them, and feed readers don't have an incentive to do that until most feed producers are already producing valid feeds. but with a new format, we have an opportunity to stop this problem before it starts.

all we need is widespread agreement among feed reader vendors to refuse to parse broken feeds. to make that unlikely scenario more likely, the group working on the format should make it clear that they encourage ignoring broken feeds, and suggest some alternative behavior that would relieve the burden on developers that brent described, such as replacing a broken feed with a link to a fixed URL explaining to the user that the feed is broken and the producer should be contacted.

i've added incoming trackbacks to the weblog, integrated with the comments as much as possible. i also added more style to the comments, hopefully making them easier to read.

dave winer writes: we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well obviously i agree here, or i wouldn't have written an application to wire up RSS to email. i love net news wire, but i just don't see a compelling distinction between the content of RSS and email.

brent simmons responds: The thing is, the mail reader aggregators are not very much like mail readers. They are smart about what they?re displaying. he goes on to mention how the net news wire interface is targeted toward the content in different ways. but his two examples of the differences between a news reader and an email reader strike me as lacking real substance. first, most email clients also have the concept of groups. second, the ability to read unread items (of subgroups) within any group is a feature that could (and should) be applied to email just as he's applied it to news items.

these differences between net news wire and an email client are so minimal that brent dismisses them in his own product description, which mentions Its familiar three-paned interface—similar to Apple Mail and Outlook Express even before discussing what the program does. i continue to see no reason that mbox couldn't have been used to syndicate news back when RSS was created.

off on the horizon, implementing initial drafts of the emerging syndication format has made it clear to me that it's substantially more than a replacement for RSS. it's custom-built for weblogging in ways that will make it overkill for something like a simple mailing list. and when it's incorporated into news readers like net news wire, i suspect it will provide the clear distinction between weblog and email content that i still don't see in RSS.

i donate money from time to time to what i find to be worthy causes, but i'm not sure i don't do more harm than good. when i buy something for my computer, i am sent piles of computer catalogs, both from the company i ordered from, and from other companies selling related products. this goes on until i change addresses (and who knows how long it lasts after that). there must be some registry of potential computer customers with my name on it. while i regret the waste of resources in this situation, i take some comfort in knowing that eventually these companies will spend more money advertising to me than they earned from my initial purchase, and i'll have done my part to put them out of business.

unfortunately, the exact same thing happens when i give money to charitable or political organizations. i get put on some sort of philanthropist registry, and i get solicitations from dozens of related organizations. and i can't take the same comfort in the wasting of money here, because i don't want these organizations to end. i just want them to gain clues.

in many cases, i'm not even sure if the soliticitations aren't costing more than i've given. some of this is my fault. not realizing that so many nonprofit organizations had such ridiculous solicitation schemes, i neglected to read fine print, and probably missed opportunities to opt out of much of this junk mail. i've been trying to remember exactly which organizations i've donated to and checking websites, but i've found no means of opting out after the initial donation (and damage) is done. one potential avenue would be to use the direct marketing association's opt out list, which i've found suggestions that nonprofits use, but i have no idea if they do use this list, and i'm not really interested in spending my own money if it's not going to help the nonprofits. luckily, i'll move again soon, and i can take more care in giving out my address next time. meanwhile, i hope the federal no-call list is soon followed up with a federal no-mail list.

i know i am an internet geek because the highlights of my day were registering a domain name, writing a regular expression debugger, and hooking up a script to notify me via AIM when someone reads a post on my weblog. these are all neat, yet of questionable usefulness.

a few weeks ago, i wrote that i think the harvey milk school is modern segregation. there is now a lawsuit against the school claiming exactly that. today tom coates writes But let's not close our minds to the option of schools that advertise themselves as gay-friendly just yet, eh? fair enough. i remain skeptical that there aren't better ways to deal with homophobia, but i'm also fairly confident that the lawsuit against the school is not motivated by a desire to end homophobia, but rather to spread it.

as mark pilgrim has already pointed out, google's new calculator function is nifty. as i was looking around for some more easter eggs, i searched for "six times seven don't be blue" to find that - shockingly - there are no results for that. am i the only person who had that rhyme drilled into my brain while learning mutliplication with flash cards? the whole rhyme is:

six times seven
don't be blue
turn me over
i'm forty-two

i spent much of last weekend on the interstate around chicago. specifically, on a stretch of about two miles, i spent far too long. this gave me time to reflect about some of what i've been reading in weblogging circles these days. flaming isn't a new phenomenon, but it seems to have moved closer to the fore since the the project to build a new syndication format began. all of the more famous webloggers have strong opinions regarding this project, for obvious reasons. and that passion has made it clear, in several instances i won't link to, that too many don't have a conscious strategy when responding to flames.

yesterday burning bird discussed the same topic in a post titled "fight or flight", which she concluded: I've thought long about the discussion I was apart of, earlier this week, and one thing that I realized from it is that flight is not an option for me. that was perhaps a foregone conclusion given the false dichotomy of the title. personally, i like to think people are intelligent enough that we can come up with better approaches to our problems than frogs can.

every time i'm in a traffic jam, i remember an article i read five years ago about traffic jams. in it, william beaty used wave physics to come to a zen-like conclusion: A single solitary driver, if they stop "competing" and instead adopt some unusual driving habits, can actually wipe away some of the frustrating traffic patterns on a highway. the idea is that while traffic jams generally have an inciting incident, such as an accident, they only continue after that point because of anti-social behavior. "stop energy" might be a good name for this behavior. perhaps it's just that i was simultaneously thinking of the two topics, but while waiting in the traffic jam, i was struck by the similarities between traffic jams and flaming.

because of the nature of beaty's solution to traffic jams, anyone practicing his suggestions won't see the results. this uncertainty, and the desire to punish the idiots who will jump into any little space make improving traffic a largely faith-based action. still, it's one i personally try to practice because it makes sense to me, and it gives me something to think about while i wait.

waiting, the solution to both traffic jams and flaming, is hard to practice. particularly on the internet, where life seems to have a faster pace (though, of course, the people living it still function at the same speed), it's hard to let an idea about which one cares passionately exist without comment. i remember when john robb wrote of a project of mine, this feed sucks. my immediate reaction was to post a response in my own weblog. but then i read the rest of the sentence. and i can tell you now, i'm glad i waited. this is as close as i have come to being involved in a flame war. as a result, what i say here may carry less authority, but just like the traffic jam solution, it makes sense to me.

waiting isn't going to work for everyone in all cases, but i think it will decrease "stop energy" more effectively than direct response. the two practices are opposite ends of a long spectrum of solutions. in an article in response to what might be called "flames against buddhist monks", ajahn amaro writes: The Buddha was asked a lot of questions in his time, and he once said there are four ways to respond to a question. The first way is to give a straight answer. The second is to ask a counter question. The third is to rephrase the question. The fourth is to remain silent. i think too many webloggers have been relying solely upon the first way. i hope we can give some consideration to the other ways before weblogs start to look any more like chicago's highways.

on request, i've added dice.com support to the job feeds. because dice.com has a much less transparent interface, you can't just copy and paste a search URL like you can with monster.com and hotjobs.com, so the searches are currently restricted to keywords. i'll probably end up doing somethign similar to rssjobs.com's copying of individual site's search form. i've avoided that before now because it adds another step at which a site can break the feeds with a minor interface change.

in other job feed news, phil wolff interviewed steve rose, who runs rssjobs.com. if anyone had interviewed me, i would have given many similar answers.

neat. diddly.com offers a tool to view random personal pictures. they do this by searching on google for pictures with names common digital cameras save to by default. it works very well. there's a lot of results, and i'm surprised how many good photographers there are out there.

the "RSS w/ RDF" feed option in the job feeds is no longer marked as "experimental". i've extracted all the metadata i can from both hotjobs.com and monster.com. in the process, i discovered that my scraper had been missing those jobs on monster.com with extra paid emphasis. how's that for irony? yet another reason monster.com should be providing their own feeds.

the next step is to look more at XML resumes and see how i can integrate that with RSS/RDF job feeds. my new end goal has moved beyond simply targeting job feeds to resumes. i also want to play around with a system of manufacturing job-specific cover letters, to be automatically emailed with a resume. it may not get anyone a job, but it will be interesting.

last week, i was pulling up ivy when i started thinking about jonathon delacour's weblog. mind you, this was several weeks after he'd stopped writing it. that's when i realized that jonathon delacour's weblog is my favorite weblog. and now he's started writing it again, so you should go read it.

very few of the examples given in RDF tutorials pass the w3c's RDF validator, which is the only RDF validator i've found. this is likely because the w3c has been deprecating it's own recommendation in favor of working drafts, which it seems no one is keeping up with. the RDF i'm including in the job feeds also doesn't validate. and the error messages aren't particularly useful. so i'm giving up on validation for now. i know it's valid XML, and it makes logical sense. if anyone wants to explain to me in english why it's not valid RDF, please leave a comment or email.

my first reaction to google's news alert service was wishing it was an RSS feed instead of email. although i've wished before that an RSS feed was email, in this case i would prefer the temporary nature of RSS. if i go away for a week, i don't want my mailbox filling up with news that will be outdated by the time i read it. i just want the current news. then i remembered mailinator, the web email system that allows anyone to check any address. so i subscribed a mailinator address to google's news alert system, and suddenly i have a custom news website at mailinator. and because mailinator automatically deletes older messages, it's a lot like RSS. now if only i could link directly to a mailinator account, i could scrape the content and convert it to RSS. but for now, this is good enough.

i'm about half done with adding RDF to RSS in the job feeds. when i started implementing, i realized i had done too much planning. because in the end, i'll just be providing whatever information i can take from the job websites. i've taken everything i can from hotjobs.com (short of following links to individual job descriptions). tomorrow i'll do the same with monster.com.

i was wrong about including alternate namespaces within the description of an RSS item. maybe i wasn't wrong that it is theoretically possible, but it breaks the feed in netnewswire lite. so i'm going to leave the information outside of the description, which means that i'll have duplicate content, both in the description and in the metadata. unfortunate, but still usable.

while attempting to include as much metadata as possible, i came up with what i think is a nifty hack. for companies that don't provide links to their websites, i'm using google's auto-forwarding feature to do a search for the company name and send the user on to the first result. because the company names are generally a few words long, and because most companies have websites, the first result has a pretty high likelihood of being the company website.

i have a few issues to catch up on related to the job feeds, after out of town all morning. first, john robb pointed out that job feeds is doing page scraping, which is of questionable legality. i emailed monster before i started this, but i never heard back from them. i will take it down if they don't like it, but the source has already been copied. i assume rssjobs.com will run into such issues before i will, because they're actually charging money to reformat someone else's data (i assume) without permission. john's suggestion was that this should be a desktop application, and ideally someone will eventually write some desktop job search applications, but i can imagine a variety of ways in which you might want to use the feeds. i don't want to lock this content directly into a single use by making the feeds inseparable from the presentation.

jon udell continues to raise interesting issues. he writes:

But there's a chicken-and-egg problem. You can't do the RDF experiment until there are interesting amounts of metadata floating around. But if we say that all metadata that can benefit from RDF must first be expressed in RDF, it's kind of a non-starter.

that was my initial thinking when i said in jon's comments that this will all be worthless if someone doesn't build the applications to read this metadata. but i've since changed my mind. RDF can encode metadata in a variety of ways such that we can selectively choose which data will be visible to an application unaware of the metadata. this means that a user of a standard RSS reader shouldn't even notice if i start sticking metadata into my RSS feed, either as descriptions of existing text, or as additional information.

so here's the plan for me: 1) design a feed that looks pretty much like the existing RSS job feed until you look at the source, and then you'll see that the job information is all marked up with RDF. 2) write myself an XML-based resume. 3) design an application to filter the RSS/RDF job feed down to jobs that match (in some yet to be determined way) the data in my resume. 4) ??? 5) get a job.

jon udell appended his piece about rss job feeds to include some mention of what i've been working on, restoring some glimmer of hope in the internet for me. before that, i'd already tried to implement what he's talking about in the job feeds (see the "experimental" RSS/RDF option), but i don't really understand a lot of things about his example, and many of his answers to questions posted in the comments reveal that he doesn't either.

so i read a bit more about RDF, and then i started wondering if there isn't already a namespace dedicated to job posts that could simply be put inside an RSS feed. sure enough, there are multiple XML formats for job posts. the first i found is only accessible through google's cache anymore, and looks a bit verbose. but then i stumbled upon the HR-XML consortium, a high-price club including some big name companies, dedicated to developing XML formats for human resources (that's what they call us when they give us jobs). the irony here is that monster.com is paying tens of thousands of dollars to this consortium, and hasn't even implemented anything as useful as what i and rssjobs.com have for free just by scraping their pages. (note to monster.com: give me that money, and i'll make you some XML feeds and write the software users would need to read them.)

unfortunately, all of HR-XML's formats are geered towards being used by businesses rather than job seekers, and so don't include information any job seeker would probably want, such as salary. so i'm just going to expand on jon's very brief description what information a job post would include.

the only decent-looking XML format i found in all this was XML resume library, a project that will possibly open up some automated job matching possibilities once we get a job format established. my initial thoughts from looking for jobs for the past few weeks are that the following information should be included, probably some of it optionally:

• job title
• job description
• job location(s)
• salary (amount and currency)
• name of employer
• URL of employer
• contact email

i had some other thoughts, but i don't think it makes sense at this point to include any information that isn't very common. for example, some jobs have application deadlines, but that information could always be included in the description. comments are welcome.

i've updated syndicator to produce valid 0.2 feeds of the unnamed format, which is in use on the main weblog, and will be in use later today on job feeds.

although most people's first thought when they read about the device for turning blood glucose into electricity is of cyborgs, mine was that this technology is ideal for diabetics, who have trouble controlling blood glucose levels. insulin pumps already exist, but now an insulin pump could operate without batteries and activate only when needed (when there is too much glucose in blood). insulin pumps are probably the one device in which it would even make sense to use glucose as an energy source. in every other case i can think of, all available glucose is being used for more important tasks like operating vital organs.

in the sixteen or seventeen odd years i've been an insulin-dependent diabetic, i've been asked probably a dozen times or so "what would happen if i took your insulin?" my answer has always been something like "i don't know, but i suspect your body would compensate its natural insulin production so that there would be no noticable effects." but thanks to an article i just read at the bbc, i can now answer more accurately: "you'll get stronger."

i had no idea so much thought had gone into international paper sizes. (via boing boing)

i've decided that weblogs are ideal for learning japanese. and i'm not talking about daily japanese leasons (although those are also good). i'm talking about japanese weblogs. for someone who has already gone through a good number of textbooks on japanese, japanese reading materials are an important step toward fluency. i've been slowly wading my way through a japanese novel for a few months now, only to discover in the last few days that my time would have been better spent reading weblogs, for a few reasons.

when i come to a word i don't know in a japanese book, i can't just look up the word, because there is no real alphabetical order for kanji. i have to find the character by some combination of stroke counting and radicals. this takes some time. when reading a weblog, i can just copy and paste the japanese into my dictionary, removing the whole process of looking up kanji. this is true of websites in general, but weblogs have other advantages.

one problem with the world of weblogs is that it's hard to find new and interesting content because the same things get pointed to by everyone. probably about 95% of the readers are reading about 5% of the writers. when learning a foreign language, this problem becomes a benefit. i wake up in the morning and read all my english language weblogs. then when i go to read my japanese weblogs, chances are pretty good that i'll find them pointing to the same material i've already read in english, which makes translating that much easier.

many weblogs also tend to break up text into small chunks, a few sentences or a paragraph that i can sit down and translate in a few minutes. when reading a japanese book, or even online news, i have to invest a significant chunk of time before i can complete a section of text. if you're learning intermediate japanese, or any other language for that matter, i highly recommend you subscribe to a few weblogs. i'm very glad i did.

tom coates has an interesting piece about his atheist views. my favorite part is in the comments, where he defends his atheism against agnostics:

I simply refuse to accept that there's anything distinct and different about "God" that makes it different at a conceptual level from Mind-Control Cheese from Denver - ie. it's basically ridiculous. I do not consider myself 'agnostic' about Mind-Control Cheese.

personally, i don't think the existence of "god" is quite as ridiculous as mind-control cheese from denver, but i just love that last line: I do not consider myself 'agnostic' about Mind-Control Cheese..

one thing that bothers me - right up there with the non-word "alls", as in "alls you have to do" - is the common belief that automation is a bad thing, or an unfortunate thing, or anything but good. it's a common idea that robots or computers are going to take our jobs, this will be the cause of huge problems throughout the world. worse than the great depression.

marshall brain's robotic nation essay is a prime example. it concludes: The arrival of humanoid robots should be a cause for celebration. With the robots doing most of the work, it should be possible for everyone to go on perpetual vacation. Instead, robots will displace millions of employees, leaving them unable to find work and therefore destitute.. you can read the whole essay, but that's probably enough to give you the basic idea i'm trying to refute here. my argument goes something like this: we don't need jobs. we only need jobs today to get us things we really need, like food, shelter, and clothing. before they are able to replace us in all other jobs, robots will be able to provide us with food, shelter, and clothing, at which point the loss of jobs will not be a problem.

we don't need jobs. no one will die from lack of employment. some of us enjoy working. some of us don't. there's no way for anyone to prevent anyone else from working. if mcdonalds fires everyone and replaces them with robots, that doesn't prevent you from starting your own restaurant and serving food to people. if you want to work, you'll always be able to work. if you don't want to work, unemployment isn't a problem.

people complain about unemployment, but lack of work isn't what really bothers anyone. it's lack of money from work. that's why the US government is sending out checks to millions of americans rather than giving everyone a job. people don't care about being unemployed if they have money.

and people don't really care about money. go give a homeless american a big pile of euro if you don't believe me. money only has value if we can spend it on things we really do care about. these things are different for everyone, but one common item of concern is food. many people don't realize that the US government has paid american farmers to not grow food. they do this because if too much of a given food is grown, the supply becomes so high that the price drops very low. extremely low prices seem like a good thing, but has some negative consequences in the long run, such as destroying the entire market for a particular crop by removing profit motivation from farmers.

in a future world in which robots are doing most or all of the farming, compensation of suppliers is no longer an important factor (robots don't get paid), and the food economy becomes entirely driven by demand. a government would have no reason to not provide a welfare net of food, at least, for all citizens, as the cost would be minimal and the demand would be high. the same is true of other common needs, like shelter and clothing, though less so than of food.

so what will all these unemployed people do? whatever they want, but there is good reason to believe it will be less manual labor and more intellectual work. throughout history the primary sector of work has shifted from agriculture to industry to service. (see continuity and change in world politics) that's a steady shift over time away from manual labor and toward intellectual labor. this isn't a shift in job interests, but an increase in automation that allows more people to do easier jobs. that's right - robots.

automation will significantly change the structure of our economy, and those unable to change with the times, like always, we be hurt in the process. but this is not a new phenomenon. this economic shift has been taking place since the dawn of civilization. we need only compare our modern lives with those of people a few hundred years ago to determine whether automation is generally positive or negative. i believe it's positive, and thus, robots are cool.

i know i said the next version of mail log would have OPML subscription options, but i lied. i decided that's going to take long enough that i shouldn't wait to release the minor changes i've made since the previous version. mail log 0.96 fixes a minor problem with email addresses and fulfills teh only two feature requests i've had so far.

rssjobs.com is offering - you guessed it - rss feeds of job searches for $5 per month. and brent links to them. i offer the same thing free and open source, no less. and does anyone notice? of course not. sigh. why do i bother?

governments have no business having anything to do with marriage. if american homophobia hasn't made this obvious enough, israel has just made it even more obvious. but it should be common sense. marriage is a ritual acknowledgement of love. i can't think of anything more personal, and less appropriate for a government to be involved in. for further reading on how governments abuse control of marriage, check out the marriage laws of countries around the world.

UPDATE: take action to help free marriage.

i added hotjobs.com support to what was formerly "monster feed" and is now "job feeds". i also gave it better error reporting. obviously i didn't get a job yet.

yes, most people in japan speak some english. more than people in america speak japanese (or anything else for that mattter). but that doesn't mean there's isn't a demand for ESL teachers in asia. clearly there is much work to do.